imperialism
Dr. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison: “The pacification of Algeria was not a long calm river, on the contrary”
Dr. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You wrote « Coloniser. Exterminer« . In your opinion, was Algeria a colonial laboratory?
Dr. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison: Yes, we can indeed consider that Algeria has been a kind of laboratory for the elaboration of a certain number of techniques of war that can be described as counter-revolutionary war and repressive techniques, particularly after the appointment of Bugeaud as governor general of Algeria in 1840. The purpose of the appointment is to carry out what the military and political leaders of the time have already called « the pacification of Algeria » and to do this, General Bugeaud will employ a number of methods of warfare and repressive techniques among which raids whose it must be specified that they sometimes lead to the destruction of entire villages and oases, the aim being to expel « indigenous » populations, as it is said at the time, and, as it is also very commonly said, to repress the « Arabs » to drive them out of the territories they occupied until now so that Europeans in general and the French in particular, the settlers, could settle in a « pacified » environment. Lire la suite »
Dr. Saïd Bouamama: “Bouteflika symbolizes the freezing of several trends and it does not make it possible to build anything.”
Fanon said: « pay attention to the emergence of business managers of the West in the new independent countries »
Dr. Saïd Bouamama. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: What is your reading of the geopolitical situation that prevails in Syria at the moment?
Dr. Saïd Bouamama: The situation in Syria is at first a situation of failure of imperialism. In fact, what is happening in Syria has been an attempt to destabilize the Syrian state by supporting jihadist groups. We think what we want from Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but he has made a great service to mankind by stopping this destabilization and this attempt to balkanize Syria. Because in reality, it is a balkanization. If we look at all the last wars, what I call the new colonial wars, what is left? Iraq is cut in pieces, Afghanistan is a complete chaos, in Somalia it is the slaughter, and Sudan is cut in two. Lire la suite »
Peter Mertens: “There is a counter-power that exists on the world scale as long as the Palestinian people will resist”
Peter Mertens. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: What do you think of the revival of populist and neo-Nazi movements in Europe in general and in Belgium in particular?
Peter Mertens: After the crisis of overproduction in 1973 and the financial bubble that erupted in 2008 by banks and speculators, we knew very well that the world could only take two directions, either the camp of the establishment itself and therefore of the elite who wanted to go even further and who wanted to install an unlimited capitalism, that is to say without counter-powers, without unions, without communist party, without alternatives, in eliminating the very idea of an alternative, unions and organized labor movements and install a kind of oligarchy, that is, an open dictatorship of capital. On the other hand, we can also see that the alternative movement, that is to say the workers’ movement and the communist forces, the Marxist forces, are seeking their way to remobilize themselves and remobilize the working class in the broad sense of the term. Lire la suite »
Prof. Robert Jensen: “There clearly is no decent human future possible in capitalism”
Prof. Robert Jensen. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: How do you explain the silence of Western media and governments regarding the massacre of the people of Yemen by the coalition led by Saudi Arabia, strategic ally of the US?
Prof. Robert Jensen: I am not an expert on the war in Yemen, but it is clear that the Saudi-led coalition has used tactics that have caused widespread civilian suffering. The US media have not completely avoided the story but also have not focused on those humanitarian disasters in the same way they would if the forces responsible were US enemies. This is a longstanding pattern, what Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky called the distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, depending on who is doing the killing. It’s one way we see that an allegedly “objective” US news media tends to fall in line behind US foreign policy. Lire la suite »
Dr. Christian Parenti: “The US engineered collapse of Iraq has been a disaster”
Dr. Christian Parenti. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your remarkable book The Freedom: Shadows And hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, you are talking about the investigations you have done on the ground in Iraq. Do not you think that the intervention of the United States marks a historic turning point not only in the Middle East but also in the USA with the unpunished crimes of the Bush administration?
Dr. Christian Parenti: Thank you for the kind words about The Freedom. While the US role in Iraq has been a humanitarian catastrophe for Iraq and the entire region, and has badly damaged US standing in global public opinion, there is nonetheless a sick imperial logic by which some of the invasion’s outcomes advance a US imperial agenda. Call it rule by chaos, state failure as imperial strategy. Russia, China and Iran all feel threatened by the chaos. Lire la suite »
Raoul Hedebouw: “We are seeing a war between the imperialist bloc and independent countries that can unfortunately lead to a global conflict.”
Raoul Hedebouw. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In the book you co-wrote with Peter Mertens « Priorité de gauche, pistes rouges pour sortie de crise” (Left-wing priority. Red slopes for crisis resolution), you talk about the neoliberal drift and you propose an alternative. Do you think that the systemic crisis of capitalism offers prospects for the constitution of a real fighting left that frames the workers’ struggle?
Raoul Hedebouw: Yes, it seems clear to me. We would do well to analyze the sequence in which we find ourselves, that is to say at the beginning of the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist countries, the neoliberals created a sequence that was the one where there was no alternative, the famous TINA (note: There is no alternative), and we must note that the 2008 banking crisis has reopened many prospects for discussion. And since 2008 and the banking crisis, there are many more prospects for debates and openings to go beyond capitalism. And we clearly see that there is a dynamic at the youth level, at the union level, where there is much more energy to debate this subject. It’s not by chance that Marx’s book « The Capital » has become a bestseller in the United States, Japan and France. Lire la suite »
Dr. María Páez Víctor: “The USA has opposed, destabilized, overthrown or assassinated every progressive reformer that has appeared on the political scene in the region for more than a century”
Dr. Maria Paez Victor. DR.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Can you tell us what the current situation is in Venezuela?
Dr. María Páez Víctor: There are 6 key issues to understanding the situation in Venezuela.
1) Petroleum: The first thing to understand is that it is all about the oil. Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world in a highly strategic geographical location. It takes 43 days for an oil tanker to travel from the Middle East to the Texas refineries, while it only takes 4 days for one to go from Venezuela there. The oil companies, and governments they support, covet Venezuelan oil. If the country only produced mangos no one would care what happened there. Lire la suite »
